Issue 9- follow the money- and tax shifting

While everyone is all excited about CareSource building a new building on the old Patterson High School site that they bought from the Dayton Board of Education for a cool million, just be aware that it’s probably the last money DPS will see from that property.

Because, of course, they sold it to the tax exempt Port Authority, who will then build the building for CareSource, and pretend to own it- or the City Commission will flat out abate it, or CareSource will claim non-profit status, despite paying their CEO $3 million plus a year.

Note- all of CareSource’s revenue comes from Federal money that is targeted to the poor. Instead of the government administering the distribution of money for health care, we’ve “privatized” it because, well, we don’t trust the government to spend our money wisely. That’s why the President of the United States only makes $400K a year, and generals make about half that. Pam Morris, CareSource CEO is worth more- and you wonder why your health care premiums keep going up?

Moving on- CareSource is in the campaign finance report for “Neighborhoods for Dayton’s Future” a sham Political Action Committee that is doing a great job of raising money and spending it outside our community- “for our future.” On 10/6/16 they wrote a check for $25,000 to raise taxes on their employees by .25% to help fund the city. Remember, they don’t pay property taxes that fund the schools, but they are willing to charge their employees- who are paid with Federal funds.

And- in another twist, to help your medical bills skyrocket- the Greater Dayton Hospital Association tossed in a cool $30,000 on 9/15/16. This is the organization that helps the two major health care operations in the area collude and maintain high prices for less than optimal care as reported by the New York Times earlier this year. If I was paid as much as their director to write this blog, I’d get you the link – and more. Note, CareSource’s CEO’s salary is set by her board, which has people from the hospitals on it, and CareSource in turn spends their money with the hospitals in one gigantic mutual admiration and back patting and wallet padding society.

This campaign has contributions from some strange places- but, before we get to those, if you look down the list- if you are a vendor with the city, you wrote a check, if you are a high level staffer, you wrote a check, if you are a city commissioner, you or your campaign wrote a check, if you are labor and you do contracts with the city you wrote a check, if you receive funding from the city- you wrote a check.

Remember how they keep selling Issue 9 by telling us that for the average person making $35K the cost is only dollars a week and how the tax is mostly paid by people who work in Dayton but don’t live in Dayton (taxation without representation)- note, the people who can vote, aren’t donating to this campaign at all. This is being sold to people as if they are stupid.

And, the only guaranteed by the legislation winners- Learn to Earn Dayton- donated $8,000 which is chump change to pay for a potential $4 million coming into your organization a year- of which 20% will go to pay their overhead and salaries.

This is anything but a “grassroots campaign,” the average donation from 150 donors was $1873.

Compare that with almost any other campaign in this community- that’s probably 10x the average.

If you wrote a check for $100 or less, you are one of a very small group of cheap-skates, most likely, low level party people who felt pressured to show support, or who thought it might help their career advancement in the Monarchy of Montgomery County.

Usually I point out donors of $1000 or more in this kind of article- but I think in this case- $2,000 is the starting point, since it’s over the average, and people from out of the area:

and their printing provider- seems odd, Spark Space Creative– of Dayton. This organization has the same name as a Columbus firm, but runs out of a house on Peters Pike by a former Lexis employee Errin Siske. Her website is a holding page. Yet, they spent $4830- no purpose given, $18,422.27 for printing, $9273.97 for printing, $10,409.42 for printing. That’s a lot of printing ($42,935.66) to be doing out of your house.

There are a lot of talented local firms that could have been hired- but, instead, they chose to bypass the Dayton talent. They spent $218,478.19

UPDATE

7:30 PM A dedicated reader took on the trouble of retyping the entire report- in a proper PDF- so it is accessible and searchable. It also has correct math. Although for the life of me- I couldn’t read some of the chicken scratch- so I can’t verify everything. But, compare the reports and see why this is important. Accessible 2016 10 27 Neighborhoods for Daytons future campaign finance report

Here is another video- shot on Tuesday, of Mayor Whaley and Jeff Mims trying to sell this tax hike at a forum sponsored by Alpha Phi Alpha. I didn’t ask a question, because of the format of the questioning- and maybe because the last time I asked a political question in a church I was thrown out (although I was assured that wouldn’t happen here).

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There is something wrong about today’s America. An estimated $6.6 billion plus spent on a media manipulated 2016 election period, billions of US taxpayer dollars bailing out Wall Street banks and trillions and still spending on illegal wars.

In just one city in “good old USA” this time of the year the Dayton St. Vincent De Paul typically sees about 60 homeless children a night but this year they are seeing about 100. Imagine this reality beyond just this one city and realize the coast to coast awful nightmare hidden by mainstream media as our politicians continue to ignore these left behind children and families. Mr. Barry Diller another arrogant billionaire is building his own little “Diller” island in the Hudson right off Manhattan to glorify his “capitalist” in awe presence. Ain’t that big of him! You think we as a nation have our priorities right?

We as a nation sent the “Chicago Boys” to Latin America, the “Berkeley Mafia” to Indonesia via CIA coups and even those “Harvard Boys” to Russia so they can sprinkle their magic “neoliberalism” dust throughout the land sacrificing and destroying any chance of democracy and leaving behind a common footprint of neocon economic failure.

It seems like we’ve or at least our corporate marionettes have perfected the concept of “Con Scheme” embedded as a core value in our beloved privatized debt based economic model. There are no real examples of success where benefits are rendered for public good and unfortunately I see no signs that the “big con” will be going away anytime soon. Its a pay to play win/loose system and “we the people” are not the winners. Corporate owns America as we citizens pay the brunt of the national tax bill. The old adage the “sh#t rolls down hill” seems to ring true and blue here in Dayton Ohio. The corporate free ride is here to stay. Whatever happened to win/win?Informative David.

David : you neglect to specify just which politico operatives orchestrated this windfall of excitement. Anybody and everybody is crowding into the celebratory pictures to snatch some of the credit. So, help us poor misguided souls out .. is it the DPS, Dasyton City Commission, Nan the Man, The County Commission trio, DDC, MVRPC or is there a responsible party that I completely missed?

Less than 2 hours after I posted this- the DDn ran a story- a puff piece- talking to CareSource who while dodging paying property taxes to the public schools- claims they are for this because it provides for the private pre-school promise.

“CareSource is in support of Issue 9, because the tax increase will help provide quality pre-school educational options for thousands of 4-year old children in our community,” said Dan McCabe, CareSource’s chief administrative officer.”

There are only 1500 preschoolers eligible each year. DPS manages about a fifth of them. They would do more if they had money for transportation.
I also updated the post with an ADA compliant filing- to take some of the mystery out… thanks to a reader.

[…] now, we’re supposed to raise the already high Dayton City Income tax to 2.5% because a bunch of the people who either get handouts from government, don’t pay taxes, or hav… to tell you that you need ANOTHER quasi-government slush fund to pay for pre-school for […]

[…] But, there is another reason early voting is uniformed voting. In this presidential cycle, you might have cast a vote for Donald Trump- before you heard that he thought it was ok to “grab them right by the pussy” or locally, voted for Issue 9 in Dayton- without knowing who had contributed all the money to the campaign to raise your taxes. […]

[…] I’ve already pointed out that the average donation to the Political Action Committee shoving t…. That the donors are all the people who will probably get some of this money back in contracts with the city- or services or tax abatement for their business. […]

[…] fully understanding why the district wasn’t making a peep against Issue 9, on my own I dug into it and found where the money was coming from, and decided to make a few videos to try to steer people away from voting for it. It didn’t […]

[…] for sale? Were multiple bids asked for? The answer, of course not. But, what was done was that CareSource kicked over $25K to the Issue 9 campaign, to help it raise taxes on its employees, to fund a private organization with an unfettered $4.5M a […]

[…] to Foley- that behind the scenes skullduggery and large donations to political campaigns (like the recent Issue 9 tax increase- that got huge donations in the first reporting period from Premier– masked through their partners in the crime we call racketeering- but they call duopoly […]

[…] didn’t file their post election report- but their pre-election report showed that this effort was well funded by all the people who manage to not pay real-estate taxes. We will see if the BOE posts their report late […]

[…] system. There was so much money behind issue 9 (and we still don’t know the half of it, since the PAC “Neighborhoods for Dayton’s Future” hasn’t filed their post election… that any half-wit journalist would start to wonder why, but since Dayton is sort of short on […]